Introduction

Before the communist revolutionary transformation of Inner Asia, the cultural context for public ritual was what Atwood terms the Buddhist ecumene (oikumene) and the Qing empire (Atwood 2011: 67). This zone extended across much of ‘High Asia’ (Haute-Asie) from the Himalayas to the shores of Lake Baikal, including areas of Tibet, Amdo, Qinghai, Gansu, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Buryatia in the first instance, but its influence also extended throughout the Qing empire to some degree. This, I argue, can be seen in civilizational terms, as a repertory of material and immaterial culture, not itself systematically integrated, but potentially subject to historical projects of systemization.

I certainly do not use the term civilization in the way that Huntington does in his treatise on the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996). There is no reason to reify the category or project upon it the sorts of strategic logics assumed for nation-state or imperial polities. Indeed, as Matlock puts it: ‘It is a mistake […] to treat a hypothetical “civilization” as anything other than a convenient intellectual construct used to establish the boundaries of a field or topic of study’ (1999: 439). As he remarks, however, ‘if we define a “civilization” as simply the subject of an intellectual inquiry, it can be a useful term’ (Matlock 1999: 438). Neither do I employ it ethnographically to refer to a particular normative concept such as a civilizing mission or the notion of wenming as discussed by Harrel (1995) and Feuchtwang (2012). I am not concerned here, then, with what Duara calls the ‘new civilization discourse’ linked to Pan-Asianism of the early twentieth century (Duara 2001). Here I simply use the term as a heuristic category, as noted above, for a cultural repertoire specified by the subject of inquiry – in this case that of the Inner Asian Buddhist ecumene of the nineteenth century and its legacy in the twenty-first.

The President Comes to the Mountain

Just after dawn on 6 July 2009 about 60 male dignitaries, policemen, lamas, musicians, ceremonial guardsmen, military officers and about the same number of male spectators waited near the summit of Mount Altan Khökhii, one of the five sacred mountains of Mongolia at which state ceremonial is conducted by the Head of State.